1.
We might also note
Kant's view of logical reasoning. In the Introduction to the
Transcendental Dialectic, Kant distinguishes “logical” from
“real” or “pure” uses of reason. The logical
use of reason represents a “subordinate faculty”
(A305/B362) of drawing inferences (syllogisms), and Kant says
relatively little about it in the Critique. It is the
“pure” use, whereby reason “itself contains the
origin of certain concepts and principles” (A299/B355), that
demands critique: hence, of course, the book's title. For
extended discussion of this distinction, see Patrone 2008: Ch. 3.

2.
This neglect is perhaps less
surprising if we recall Kant's very disparaging remarks about
attempts to answer the general question, “What is truth?”
at B82/A58ff.

3.
Cf. O'Neill 1984,
which draws on Jean Piaget's studies of young children's
knowledge of the world. When asked whether the number of beads will
stay the same when they are spread out over a longer distance, for
instance, children below a certain age will assume that the number of
beads has increased. As O'Neill says, it is difficult to say just
what the child believes in this case; in Kant's terms, his or her
beliefs do not meet the formal conditions of truth.

4.
Cf. also Kant's
discussion in the Prolegomena: “The difference between
truth and dream… is not decided through the quality of the
representations that are referred to objects, for they are the same in
both, but through their connection according to rules that determine
the combination of representations in the concept of an object, and how
far they can or cannot stand together in one experience.”
(4:290)

5. It is easy to miss the
role that others' judgments play when reading the first Critique,
since Kant's concern is largely with the transcendental conditions of
experience in general, and hence with an individual knower. However,
as Gelfert 2006 has persuasively argued, testimony (and hence
communication: cf sections 3.2 and 3.3 of the main entry) are
fundamental to Kant's analysis of knowledge among actual human
beings. For example, Kant's lectures on logic refer to 'the criterion
of truth: to compare one's opinions with those of other
people... The principle of indifference etc. to the judgments of
others in comparison with my own is [by contrast] the principle of
logical egoism' (24.2:740, as quoted/translated by Gelfert 2006:
644). See also Mikalsen 2010 for a recent application of these
insights.

6.
Cf. “the systematic
unity of the understanding's cognitions… is the
touchstone of truth of rules” (A647/B675); “it can
never be permitted to ascribe such a faculty [i.e., freedom] to
substances in the world itself, because then the connection of
appearances necessarily determining one another in accordance with
universal laws, which one calls nature, and with it the mark of
empirical truth, which distinguishes experience from dreaming, would
largely disappear” (A451/B479); “What is connected with
a perception according to empirical laws, is actual” (A376).
Cf. Bxli, A492/B520f.

8.
O'Neill 1989: Ch. 1
especially emphasises this passage, as well as the epigraph that Kant
added to the second edition of the Critique from Francis
Bacon's Great Instauration. Bacon deploys the same
imagery of making trial, secure founding, planning, construction,
modesty and limits that Kant now uses.

9.
Kant often uses the
disparaging verb “vernünfteln,” akin to
“rationalise” (Vernunft being the German word for
reason).

10.
Cf. Kant's comment in
the Prolegomena: “High towers and the
metaphysically-great men who resemble them, around both of which there
is usually so much wind, are not for me.” (4:373n)

11.
Kant states this very clearly in “What Does it Mean to Orient
Oneself in Thinking?”: “if reason will not subject itself
to the laws it gives itself, it has to bow under the yoke of laws
given by another; for without any law, nothing—not even
nonsense—can play its game for long” (8:145).

12.
“But who would even want to
introduce a new principle of morality and, as it were, first invent it?
Just as if, before him, the world had been ignorant of what duty is or
in thoroughgoing error about it.” (Critique of Practical
Reason, 5:8n)

13.
Kant was already clear about this in the
so-called “Prize essay,” an “Inquiry concerning the
distinctness of the principles of natural theology and morality”
(1764). He expands on the point in the first Critique's
Doctrine of Method, in the section entitled, “The Discipline of
Pure Reason”; cf. Bx ff.

14.
Thus a number of writers have stressed
the more modest, defensive idea of vindication at work in Kant: not a
positive proof that permits no doubt, but a defence that address the
specific worries of specific audiences. Cf. Ameriks 2003, or this
passage from Łuków (1993, 221): “It is neither
sufficient nor possible to prove law and freedom, but it is
sufficient and possible to defend them by identifying the
practical constraint which testifies to their instantiation in actual
lives.”

15.
Passages at A310/B358 and A316/B373 are very close to the central
principle of legal order explored in the Doctrine of Right, the first
part of the Metaphysics of Morals—but this is not yet
the underlying idea of the Categorical Imperative.

16.
Please see the note at the beginning of the bibliography for an
explanation of these references to Kant's moral writings.

17.
We might add a third reason. We also
have an interest in the unity of philosophy, that might be frustrated
if practical and theoretical reason did not stand in a definite
hierarchy. Cf. Guyer 1989.

18.
Of these ideas, we have already seen the
special status of freedom in Kant's system (just as it had a
somewhat anomalous position within the “Antinomies” of the
first Critique). In fact, the postulates only appear after
Kant thinks he has demonstrated the practical reality of freedom, which
is known to us by the second Critique's famous (and, as
we have seen, nearly as controversial) “fact of
reason.”

19.
Kant is not totally pessimistic about
the results of good action—in his Lectures on Ethics,
he comments, “if only all men together were unanimously willing
to promote their happiness, we might make a paradise of Novaya
Zemlya” (Collins, 27:285f). Novaya Zemlya is a Russian arctic
archipelago—ironically enough, one later used as a nuclear test
site. (My thanks to Jens Timmermann for this reference and
information.)

20.
A terminological note: Kant sometimes also refers to this as the
highest “derived” good, as compared with God's existence
as the highest “original” or “independent”
good—5:125, 132; “What Does it Mean to Orient Oneself in
Thinking?” 8:139.

21.
One might also cite the fact that Kant
links autonomy not only to practical but also theoretical reason:
“the power to judge autonomously—that is, freely
(according to principles of thought in general)—is called
reason.” (Conflict of the Faculties, 7:27)

22.
But the maxims are formulated much
earlier, before the publication of the first Critique: see the
unpublished notes R1486, 15:715f (1775-77) and R1508, 15:820, 822
(1780-84); they also appear in the Lectures on Logic, 9:57, as
“general rules and conditions for avoiding error.”

23.
Kant's words repay close reading:
To think for oneself “is the maxim of reason that is never
passive. The tendency [to passivity], hence to heteronomy of
reason, is called prejudice; and the greatest prejudice of all
is representing reason as if it were not subject to the rules of
nature, i.e. superstition. Liberation from superstition is
called enlightenment, since, although this term is also
applied to liberation from prejudices in general, it is superstition
above all… that deserves to be called a prejudice, since the
blindness to which superstition leads… is what makes most
evident the need to be led by others, hence the condition of a passive
reason.” (5:294f)

24.
“What Does it Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking?”
8:144. Cf.: “…if this freedom [of the pen] is denied, we
are deprived at the same time of a great means of testing the
correctness of our own judgments, and we are exposed to error”
(Anthropology, 7:129). Universal
communicability is also central to Kant's account of
aesthetic judgment, following his discussion of the three maxims in the
third Critique (5:295-7).

25.
For a rather different, but perhaps complementary, attempt to
reconstruct key Kantian insights about reason, while preserving
aspects of the instrumental and communitarian approaches, see Robert
Brandom 2001 and 2002: Ch. 1.

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